Tag: David Berlinski
Berlinski, Wells & ID Take Los Angeles
After having the premier of Darwin’s Dilemma canceled by the California Science Center, Avi Davis’s American Freedom Alliance really pulled things together in heroic fashion in Los Angeles. The AFA found a new venue, hardly inferior, where academic freedom may be less endangered: the University of Southern California. The sizable crowd on Sunday night of about 230 people was appreciative and intelligent. There were university students representing both sides of the Darwin debate, high school students from a church school in Santa Monica on a field trip, and a mix of other folks from the community. The film is a powerful document. The word that came to my mind watching it was “spooky.” Besides very lucidly and compellingly laying out Read More ›
Controversial New Collection Highlights Berlinski’s Dismantling of the Facade of Scientific Overconfidence
What do Discover magazine, The London Gazette, The Wichita Eagle, Commentary, Forbes, The Weekly Standard and UC Berkeley’s student paper, The Daily Californian, all have in common? They are just some of the publications that have published an essay or opinion piece by David Berlinski in the past 15 years. And those pieces are among 32 of Berlinski’s finest finally collected together in one volume: The Deniable Darwin. Berlinski, there is little argument, is a skeptic’s skeptic — the last of a dying breed. Lately it seems that everywhere one looks there is someone with the answer to everything. There are precious few true skeptics left, and Berlinski is certainly in the top rank in regards to the sciences. When Read More ›
Studying the Devil’s Delusion, or A Guided Tour of the Ditchkins’ Dilemma
David Berlinski is currently stateside for his speaking tour of the U.S., and The Devil’s Delusion is selling briskly, already in its second printing in paperback. Now there’s a new discussion guide to complement Dr. Berlinski’s powerful book. Because Dr. Berlinski’s enjoyable style makes the book so eminently readable, not to mention its importance as a response to the new atheists, The Devil’s Delusion and its new discussion guide are a natural choice for book clubs, small groups, adult Sunday school classes, and anyone who wants to delve a little deeper. The guide reads as if a college professor highlighted the book’s most trenchant points and asked the class to chew on them, a style that proves fertile for book Read More ›
Spending the Public’s Money: It’s a Tough Job
Seeking relief from the demands of geschaeft, The Washington Times reported recently, senior officials at the National Science Foundation routinely spend a great deal of their time (and our money) visiting pornographic sites on the Internet. Just possibly, I suspect, they spend all of their time on stress relief and none on the public’s business, stress relief so striking as to cancel its cause entirely. “The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive,” the Times reported, “they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.”
David Berlinski: Does Darwin Matter?
ENV: How do the scientific issues you write about affect the way we live? Why should the Darwin question matter to people who don’t normally concern themselves with scientific theories?DB: I think of the Darwinian debate in the way that Dickens thought of Jardynce v Jarndyce in Bleak House. It is awfully easy to be sucked into it, and once suckered, awfully difficult to get out. I have seen it so often. A man wakes and because has read a book or scanned an essay, he is persuaded that he can make a contribution. He is eager to make it. He offers his opinion on the Internet and is gratified by the prospect of the congratulations that he is shortly Read More ›